Critical Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition

Critical Phenomenology and

Embodied Cognition

MA (Research) Philosophy Thesis

Universiteit van Amsterdam

Supervisor: Dr. Christian Skirke

Second Reader: Dr. Maarten Coolen

Table of Contents

Introduction

A Critique of Embodied Cognition 4

Methodology 5

Summary of the Argument 6

Chapter 1: Circadian Rhythms in Embodied Cognition: An

Intercorporeal-Affordance Account

Introduction 8

1.1 Circadian Rhythms 8

1.1.1 The Empiricist Perspective

1.1.2 The Traditional Cognitivist Perspective

1.2 Embodied Cognition 10

1.2.1 The Link Between Empiricism and Traditional Cognitivism: Mediationalism 1.2.2 Embodiment

1.2.3 Further Developments

1.3 The Skilled Intentionality Framework 13

1.3.1 Preliminaries

1.3.2 Phenomenology of Affordances

1.4 The Intercorporeality Framework 16

1.4.1 Preliminaries

1.4.2 Intercorporeality, not Intersubjectivity 1.4.3 Mutual Incorporation

1.5 Back to Circadian Rhythms 19

1.5.1 From Seconds to Days: Patterned Practices

Conclusion 20

Chapter 2: The Tendency Towards Optimal Grip

Introduction 22

2.1 Transcendental Phenomenology 22

2.1.1 Meaning Thematised 2.1.2 Husserl’s Skilled Ego

2.1.3 Responsiveness to Normativity 2.1.4 Merleau-Ponty and Motricity

2.2 Non-seamlessness 26

2.3.1 The ‘Tendency Towards Optimal Grip’ is Insufficient for Describing Alienation 2.3.2 A Closer Look at Alienation

2.3.3 Phenomenology, Not Ideology Critique

Conclusion 32

Chapter 3: Critical Phenomenology

Introduction 33

3.1 Adorno and Phenomenology 33

3.1.1 Adorno and Husserl 3.1.2 Adorno and Merleau-Ponty 3.1.3 Object Transcendence

3.2 Bodily Thinking 39

3.2.1 Adorno’s Account of Embodiment 3.2.2 Adorno’s Account of Concepts 3.2.3 Contrast with Merleau-Ponty

3.3 Alienation 43

Conclusion 45

Conclusion: Critical Phenomenology and Embodied Cognition

References

Introduction

A Critique of Embodied Cognition

One mark of a concept’s importance is the way thinkers illustrate misconceptions around it. It is now popular to say that we are our bodies. So popular, in fact, that Preciado (2017) has polemically suggested in his essay, ‘My Body Doesn’t Exist’, that his body does not exist. He does this from a position of social exclusion. Essentialised representations of gender and sexuality produced by (medical, bureaucratic, political, etc.) technologies and discourses exclude Preciado’s trans body from (medical, bureaucratic, political, etc.) space. They do so because they construct the space in which Preciado’s body could be said to exist, but, metaphorically speaking, they formulate the coordinate axes such that his body is not there.

The title of his essay pushes against the tide of recent philosophical discourse that has turned towards the body rather than the mind as the site of the human. The human’s fundamental

embodiment underlies this discourse. But his argument in the essay itself runs with that tide. Embodiment should be distinguished from the claim that underlies the title of Preciado’s essay. Preciado’s ‘body-that-does-not-exist’ is causally and logically produced by technologies and discourses that do not recognise trans bodies. But the phenomenological idea of embodiment - which I will discuss in this thesis - remains. It stresses what must be the case for experience to be the way it is. For Preciado, being a trans body involves this experience of coming into

contradiction with state bureaucracy, and thereby the experience of being excluded. Preciado’s argument does not diminish the fact that he exists as excluded. Hence, his argument does not negate the phenomenological notion of embodiment, but sharpens its focus against misconceptions about the body being the vessel our identities occupy.

The aim of this thesis is to interrogate ways of understanding cognition in terms of embodiment, which I term ‘Embodied Cognition’. The study of Embodied Cognition branches many disciplines, especially cognitive science. Rather than a definition or taxonomy of Embodied Cognition, this thesis is a philosophical critique of its phenomenological basis: is it philosophically sound? My central claim is that its underpinning in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of

embodiment limits its critical reflection on alienation. One of Merleau-Ponty’s major works, the

Phenomenology of Perception, lies at the heart of embodiment theories of cognition. But its inability

to understand alienation is one of the main reasons to shift focus to another philosophical tradition in early Twentieth Century Europe, The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, which makes

alienation central to its account of everyday modern life. One of its major representatives, Theodor Adorno, had concerns that closely mirror those of Merleau-Ponty. But he also had trenchant criticisms of phenomenology. Interestingly, his published critiques did not fall on the shoulders of Merleau-Ponty, but on Husserl, a philosopher to whom Merleau-Ponty was intellectually indebted. However, Merleau-Ponty also had his disagreements with Husserl, and one of the aims of this thesis is to show a surprising affinity between Merleau-Ponty and Adorno on this point. Moreover, Adorno had ideas about embodiment that can help us understand alienation better than Merleau-Ponty. Furthermore, one implicit assumption shared by phenomenology and Critical Theory is that

everyday life should be understood. Hence, another objective of my thesis is to show what their

Methodology

These claims which I wish to advance face a methodological difficulty because they emerge out of a dialogue between two different philosophical traditions. To provide shape to my argument, talking about conceptual frameworks allows us to distinguish them from world views that encompass them and theories that emerge from them. Following Bruineberg’s (2017, 34) Wittgensteinian categorisation, we can say that world views are ontologies that have “strong epistemic, ethical and existential consequences”. Wittgenstein (1979, 9) says world views are comprehensive

“perspicuous presentations[s]” that allow us to see connections between things. They contour the sphere of intelligibility in which we understand and act in the world; they are pictures that hold us captive (cf. Wittgenstein 1958, §115). In the philosophy of science, Kuhn (1962, 23 et passim) refers to these world views as “paradigms”. This does not mean they must be globally held or

constituted exclusively by a priori claims. They are revisable. There are various strands within a world view, called conceptual frameworks. Bruineberg (2017, 27) defines them as “tool[s] to make explicit and intelligible the concepts and structures that constitute, underlie, or in some other sense relate to a particular phenomenon”. Theories advance hypotheses for testing. These hypotheses have different normative criteria to conceptual frameworks, namely hypotheses ought to be falsifiable (Bruineberg 2017, 33; cf. Popper 2002, 18 et passim). In what follows, I will not discuss theories except in passing. I propose Embodied Cognition is a world view distinct from what I will call ‘Traditional Cognitivism’, which preceded it. I will pay close attention to two conceptual 1

frameworks within Embodied Cognition: the Skilled Intentionality Framework and the Intercorporeality Framework.

Since my arguments need to interrogate a world view and its conceptual tools that help us understand our bodies, I will analyse concepts where necessary. This sometimes involves breaking them up, occasionally arguing for a definition, and, at times, relating them to other concepts. Moreover, a thesis on methodological issues in phenomenology needs some phenomenological descriptions to work with. Particular ways of expressing the same idea can help bring out the experiential dimension required in these descriptions, so focus will sometimes turn to figuration rather than argumentation. This can mean using less technical vocabulary where more arid prose might conceal the phenomenon I want to disclose; sometimes works of literature can do a better job than academic philosophy.

Moreover, drawing two philosophers into a dialogue they never actually had means interpreting what they said elsewhere, and what they would say to each other if they had

conversed. Since my aim in this thesis is to critique contemporary discussions of embodiment, my interpretation of what they (would) say is coloured by this vested interest in contemporary

research. Hence, my interpretations rationally reconstruct arguments from different contexts to suit my own purposes, rather than expressing what Merleau-Ponty and Adorno meant to say but never did.2

Traditional Cognitivism goes under different labels elsewhere, e.g., “mainline cognitive science” (Dreyfus

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2005, 129); “standard cognitive science” (Shapiro 2012, 1); “Cartesian cognitive science” (Rowlands 2010, 2); and, simply “cognitivism” (Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991, 7).

Cf. Rorty’s (1984, 49) critical elaboration of “rational reconstructions” in philosophical historiography.

Summary of the Argument

Chapter 1 will explain what Embodied Cognition is by describing its core features with a concrete example. That example is the human circadian rhythm. These biologically rooted daily rhythms (from Latin: circa - rhythm, dies - day) are philosophically interesting because they are global, have wide-reaching influence over our lives - not only in shaping our actions, but also our moods, desires and ability to think - and operate at the intersection between individual bodies and social systems. Embodied Cognition can say a great deal about the complexity of this

phenomenon, whilst circadian rhythms can draw out the major themes of Embodied Cognition. To see this, I will show why Embodied Cognition superseded Traditional Cognitivism. Central to this transformation is Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. Within Embodied Cognition, two conceptual frameworks are identifiable. The Skilled Intentionality Framework takes up Merleau-Ponty’s notion of embodiment and weaves it with ecological psychology and neurodynamics to study actions of (primarily) a single individual. The Intercorporeality Framework focuses on action between subjects, which brings about their embodied entwinement. I postulate that these two frameworks do not contradict each other, but merely emphasise different things: skilled actions and encounters, respectively. I will then show how they bring out phenomenological features of circadian rhythms, telling us more about how they shape our lives than standard empiricist or traditional cognitivist accounts.

Chapter 2 abstracts away from circadian rhythms, and the specificities of the two

frameworks, to consider Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, situating a key concept - the tendency towards optimal grip - in its phenomenological history. ‘Grip’ should to be understood in all of its various senses in English, from comprehension to physically holding an object to having traction in a situation. The tendency towards an optimal grip is the propensity for subjects to attune themselves to their environment. I will argue that phenomenology is inherently

transcendental, and this tendency is a culmination of reflections on how meaningful experiences are constituted. I will then entertain objections to the applicability of this concept. It would seem, at least, that if the tendency towards optimal grip is part of how we exist as embodied beings-in-the-world, that rules out the tendency being interrupted in any way. However, the literature in, and related to, Embodied Cognition shows that tendency is not inevitable because disrupted intercorporeal encounters and disabling accounts of embodiment are cases where this tendency is restricted. I will then suggest another line of critique that proves more problematic: experiences of alienation satisfy the tendency towards optimal grip, but remain, phenomenologically, unfulfilled. I will then situate this non-fulfilment - or ‘hollowness’ - in a tripartite structure:

(1) one’s lived embodiment is experienced as alien to oneself. (2) to live in the midst of essentially fungible things.

(3) to experience one’s own body as on the same level as fungible things.

Before delving deeper into this structure, Chapter 3 will once again zoom out. If phenomenology is critical reflection, then it is fruitful to consider how Critical Theory could approach a phenomenological account of embodiment. One likely candidate for providing such an account is Adorno, whose descriptions of everyday life in Minima Moralia suggest a

phenomenological aspect to his philosophy. One problem to assuage is his trenchant critique of Husserlian phenomenology. Having navigated that critique, I set up Adorno’s account of ‘bodily thinking’ in contrast to Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment. I also explain Adorno’s

commitment to the role of concepts in thinking, and his way of thinking dialectically. With that I then return to the tripartite structure of alienation and re-draw it along the lines of bodily thought, showing that the experience of alienation is that of inhabiting a contradiction.

In the end, I hope to show Embodied Cognition would benefit from a shift to Adorno’s account of embodiment - namely ‘the body thinks dialectically’ - since this supports a

Chapter 1: Circadian Rhythms in

Embodied Cognition: An

Intercorporeal-Affordance Account

Introduction

This chapter will introduce the topic of this thesis - Embodied Cognition - through a case study of circadian rhythms. Circadian rhythms are internally generated daily rhythms that attune us to environmental changes in advance. I will say more about this complex phenomenon and how they shape our lives in 1.1. To do this, I will explain their importance from empiricist and traditional cognitivist perspectives. 1.2 abstracts away from circadian rhythms to interrogate their shared philosophical assumption: ‘mediationalism’. I will then explain why the phenomenological notion of embodiment can revolutionise our understanding of human activity, and why it has been transformative in the cognitive sciences. The next two sections will do this by illustrating how embodiment is utilised in two conceptual frameworks for understanding human cognition. These frameworks are the Skilled Intentionality Framework (1.3) and the Intercorporeality Framework (1.4). In 1.5, I return to circadian rhythms with these frameworks in mind, in order to illustrate in further detail how circadian rhythms shape our lives. My focus throughout will be on human circadian rhythms and (cognitive) activity.

1.1 Circadian Rhythms

1.1.1 The Empiricist Perspective

In order to transform energy effectively, organisms must ensure their “biological processes occur in the appropriate sequence or ‘temporal framework’” (Foster and Kreitzman 2017, 2). Without this temporal framework and its synchronisation to the environment, our biology would be in chaos. No doubt readers who have had jet-lag will appreciate how temporal de-synchronisation can have debilitating effects, as long as their body’s ‘internal day’ is not entrained to the ‘astronomical day’ of their new environment. Indeed, regular sleep disruption, working at night, eating at unusual times of day, and many other altered conditions impact biological physiology and behaviour similarly. That these are abnormal situations attests to the importance of circadian rhythms. Successful synchronisation, or ‘entrainment’, involves entraining signals, or external time-givers known as zeitgebers. These zeitgebers are usually changes in the physical environment, such as temperature changes throughout the day, or social signals that emerge in regularly re-occurring interactions. Without doubt, changes in light intensity as the earth rotates and the sun rises and sets are the most powerful zeitgeber in nearly all organisms, including humans. In spite of these external cues, circadian rhythms have long been known to be endogenous, which means an organism has some internal ‘clock’ that keeps ’ticking’ in the absence of zeitgebers. Not only that, but the internal clock is not driven by zeitgebers, but “generated internally, and then

Entrainment is possible because of the coherence of physiological structure, which maintains its integrity throughout environmental changes, whilst also being responsive to zeitgebers. This is achieved by a “24-hour central pacemaker” (Foster and Kreitzman 2017, 9). In humans, the central pacemaker is the suprachiasmic nucleus (SCN), situated at the base of the hypothalamus, just over the point where the optic nerves enter the brain, indicating how important light signals are as zeitgebers (Moore 1983). Every tissue examined to date in humans has local pacemakers

coordinated by the SCN. Indeed, virtually all cells of the body have ‘clocks’. These localised time-keepers regulate biological processes in the relevant tissue or cell, and provide feedback

information to the SCN. This allows the body to function in synchrony, with the SCN providing ‘top-down’ entrainment to tissues throughout the body, whilst those tissues provide ‘bottom-up’ feedback to the SCN. Furthermore, these local pacemakers are themselves interconnected, providing further coherence to the entire circadian system. These entrainment pathways also operate within cells: at the molecular level, biochemical reactions associated with circadian rhythms involve feedback loops. These loops entrain cell processes to the broader circadian 3

system.

Bechtel (2013, 488) has usefully characterised such empirical biological explanations as dynamically mechanistic. It is dynamical because the system’s states at any given time are

dependent on parameters that are themselves time-dependent. Moreover, it is mechanistic because it: (1) delineates the phenomenon to be explained, (2) identifies and decomposes the responsible mechanism, and (3) recomposes and situates the mechanism. Step (3) distinguishes this approach from reductionism, which stops at (2). That it is a mechanism implies our experience of living through these rhythms, as modulated by our circadian rhythm, is nothing more than behaviour. Experience is considered a set of propensities that are causally effectuated by the dynamical mechanism, and whatever else it is is left unarticulated. Indeed, what is articulated is that

behaviour is about efficiently transforming energy. As far as empirical biological research goes, this is not a problem, although if it were to answer the question ‘how do circadian rhythms shape our lives?’, it would not go much beyond listing types of behaviours associated with different

moments in the circadian cycle as an adequate account of life, and as ways in which organisms transform energy.

1.1.2 The Traditional Cognitivist Perspective

A large body of circadian rhythm research in Traditional Cognitivism is concerned with the extent to which cognitive performance is affected by changes in circadian rhythms (e.g., Krishnan and Lyons 2015; Schmidt et al. 2009; Valdez, Ramírez and García 2014; Waterhouse 2010), with some showing, in detail, a causal connection between the neural correlates of sleep regulation,

wakefulness and associated cognitive activity and circadian rhythms (e.g., Gaggioni et al. 2014). Other research shows sustained attention on a cognitive task can entrain a circadian cycle (e.g., Gritton et al. 2009, 2012). In order to take a philosophical perspective, it is useful to understand what is meant by ‘attention’ and ‘cognitive performance’.

As Cohen (2014, 4) points out in a survey of how ‘attention’ is employed in neurocognitive literature, “the term attention refers to a relatively broad class of cognitive processes that have certain common underlying features (e.g., selection, focus) occurring as a function of more elementary component processes linked to specific neurobiological mechanisms”. If we take

More specifically, they involve transcription-translation feedback loops that allow the “proper oscillation of

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Gritton et al.’s (2012) research as exemplary, their experiments on rats show that attention involves detection readiness (i.e. focus) and signal discrimination from background noise (i.e. selection). Furthermore, they claim the neurobiological mechanisms regarding attention in rats include, but are not limited to, the SCN, which we have already seen is central to the mammalian circadian system. Mutual cross-over between neurobiological components involved in attention and circadian regulation indicate that attention can have entraining effects on a circadian rhythm.

Attention is just one component of a broader set of cognitive processes, which share a basic assumption about what cognition, and hence ‘cognitive performance’, involves. Thagard (2014, §3) usefully characterises the central assumption of Traditional Cognitivism as computationalism, which understands cognition in terms of “representational structures in the mind and

computational procedures that operate on those structures”. Computationalism views the mind as an information processor, which can have a greater or lesser performance according to the same criteria as any information processor, such as processing speed and capacity. And, as Cohen (2014, 4) points out, attention facilitates computation in a number of ways: “[a]ttention serves to reduce the amount of information that will receive additional focused and sustained processing by the brain. At other times, attention enables a larger amount of information to receive additional processing”.The claim of the work by Gritton, his colleagues, and many others, is that circadian rhythms are related to attention via neurobiological mechanisms, which are, in turn, the physical instantiation of information processors.

What this account maintains is that our experience can be substituted by computation in order to model the way that circadian rhythms shape our lives. Throughout the day, our circadian rhythms modulate our computational proficiency, alter our ability to sustain attention, and, by implication, change corresponding computational abilities such as memory storage capacity, retrieval speed, and so on. Like the biological account of circadian rhythms, this account suits its purpose, namely to measure changes in information processing. However, in adopting this approach, Traditional Cognitivism omits exploration of the first-personal, experiential aspect of our lives as it is shaped by circadian rhythms, since we do not often take ourselves to be

computing information about the environment and ourselves, but living it.

1.2 Embodied Cognition

1.2.1 The Link Between Empiricism and Traditional Cognitivism:

Mediationalism

From both an empiricist and a traditional cognitivist perspective, circadian rhythms profoundly shape our lives. I have pointed out how they substitute an account of experience with an account of behaviour and computation respectively. In Husserlian terms, we can say they view experience from the “natural attitude” (Husserl 1960, §15, 1982, §51), or, in McDowell’s (1994, 86) terms, as if from “sideways on”.

Not only do they fall prey to the same objectivist tendency, but their problems are internally connected. The traditional cognitivist account matches up with the empiricist account insofar as both assume behaviour ‘out there in the world’ is the result of computations ‘in the head’. That is, they both presuppose what Dreyfus and Taylor (2015, 40 et passim) call “mediationalism”. An explanation of mediationalism begins with Dreyfus’ 1970-80s critique of artificial intelligence research, and the concomitant idea that the human mind is similar to a computer (i.e. Traditional Cognitivism) (Dreyfus 1979, 1982; Dreyfus and Dreyfus 1986). Dreyfus’ critique of traditional

cognitivism did not provide a knock-down argument, but highlighted abundant deficiencies when dealing with the phenomenology of experience. Traditional Cognitivism is a world view stemming from the assumption that mind and world relate through a form of representationalism. Taylor (2005) built on this critique of representationalism as positing representations that mediate between mind and world to argue that an even deeper foundationalist strategy tends towards a certain conceptual topology. This topology - mediationalism - shapes the ideas cognitive scientists, biologists and philosophers of mind articulate.

Together, Dreyfus and Taylor (2015, 1-16) argue that mediationalism has a conceptual structure with four interwoven strands. First, as Bruineberg (2017, 7) explains, it has an “‘only through’ structure: we have access to the ‘outside’ world only through the bounds of the mind/ organism”. Second, knowledge is seen as a form of knowing-that, of which the elements of such knowledge “[consist] of separate and clearly defined entities” that are articulated, explicit and first-person accessible (Bruineberg 2017, 7). Third, justifying beliefs about these elements is only

possible with reference to what impinges on the subject’s interior mental life. Fourth,

mediationalism is a form of “dualist sorting between the mental and the physical” (Bruineberg 2017, 8). This is a conceptual (rather than ontological) dualism because it sorts elements into mental and physical categories to which materialists could assent only the physical is really instantiated.

Taken together, these four strands depict the logic of interiority/exteriority of the mental and physical aspects of living organisms, with the mediation between these two sides often operating through representational items. The link between the empiricist and traditional cognitivist

accounts of circadian rhythms is that each takes one side of this interior/exterior topology as their focus. In the result, the phenomenology of experience is lost, replaced by behaviour or

computation. Computations are assumed to deal with knowing-that elements that are strictly first-person accessible, of which behaviour is the indication but not proof. Behaviour is what happens out in the environment which brings about sensory impingements, which are taken up by the interior mental life modelled by computations.

This topology has also been described as employing a “fundamental mental ‘locational’ commitment” (Varga and Heck 2017, 77). It maintains that mental processes occur in the brain and these processes “can be characterised in abstraction from the kind of body/brain that realizes it” (Shapiro 2004, 175; cf. Clark 2008, 199; Rowlands 2010, 54). Mediationalism and the locational assumption both owe a resounding debt to Descartes, although Descartes’ ontological dualism between two kinds of substance is replaced by a sorting procedure into two conceptual categories for scientific research.

A view that has arisen in a number of important recent works in cognitive science,

phenomenology and philosophy of mind is that this world view of the mind’s relation to the world precludes advances in our understanding of cognition (e.g., Varela Thompson and Rosch 1991; Thompson 2007). But this does not mean we must take it as a logically necessary starting point. Accordingly, many theorists in these fields have turned towards the central contention underlying Dreyfus and Taylor’s critique: phenomenology is missing from our accounts of cognition. In

particular, what is lacking is the phenomenology of our essentially embodied engagement with our environment.

1.2.2 Embodiment

There is not yet a consensus for a definition of embodiment in the literature (Wilson 2002). Heuristically, we can distinguish three versions of this new world view:

(1) Cognition is, at the very least, misconstrued if the role of the body is ignored (Varga and Heck 2017). This version is the weakest because it could imply the body is important, but still just scaffolding surrounding the mind, thus preserving the interior/exterior topology of

mediationalism.

(2) More strongly, the “body acts as a (partial) realizer of cognitive processing” (Varga and Heck 2017, 78). This is slightly stronger, in that cognition cannot be understood as operating on only one side of the division between mental and physical. Nonetheless, the topological division remains because cognitive processes are thought to originally lie in the mental realm.

(3) The third version is rooted in Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, although his ideas go back to Husserl. Husserl (1970, 320) distinguished between the subjectively felt, “living body” [Leib] and the objectively reckoned “physical body” [Körper]. I can experience my own body as if it were merely organic stuff only in rare situations where I suddenly feel (parts of myself) ’disembodied’. For example, if I wake up with no feeling in my arm from lying on it awkwardly, or catch myself in a mirror unexpectedly, then I experience my body as not entirely my own. In contrast, our primary experience of our own body is agential, a point Merleau-Ponty (2012, 139) influentially interpreted with his idea of bodily intentionality. I experience the world through my body in that I can pick up cups, open windows, catch buses, and so on. My body is simultaneously a source of possibility and a point of orientation upon the world. This is the most far-reaching version because the topological division itself is held to be fundamentally misguided. I am no mind in a body; the ‘I’ does not reside in a body like a driver in a car. “I am my body” (Marcel 1949, 12).

Embodied Cognition takes seriously at least one of these formulations of embodiment, although the most interesting is the third. Furthermore, Merleau-Ponty’s ideas have been historically influential in setting the terms of Embodied Cognition. Its major progenitors, the authors of The Embodied Mind, Varela, Thompson and Rosch, claim their research is “a modern continuation of a program of research founded over a generation ago by … Merleau-Ponty” (1991, xv). A cursory glance at the literature shows that Merleau-Ponty’s influence has not waned since (e.g., Gibbs 2005; Sheets-Johnstone 1999; Thompson 2007). My discussion will take these authors at face value and interpret Embodied Cognition charitably as relinquishing Traditional Cognitivism’s central assumptions as far as possible in favour of the third version of embodiment.

1.2.3 Further Developments

Although my focus will be on embodiment, research in Embodied Cognition has taken up more dimensions to engender so-called ‘4E Cognition’, which I can briefly indicate here. Since the first E is usually taken to be embodiment, we can move on to the second E. Inspired by Jonas’ (2001) philosophy of biology, the core claim of the second E, enactivism, is that there is a continuity between biological systems and cognitive systems (Colombetti 2014; Di Paolo 2009; Thompson 2007; Varela, Thompson and Rosch 1991). This has also been called the“life-mind continuity thesis” because both “share the same set of organisational properties” (Kirchhoff 2018, 2519-2520). This continuity rests on the intrinsic autopoiesis (emergent self-organisation) that all living

organisms express through action (Maturana and Varela 1980).4

Extended cognition, the third E, begins with the assumption that cognition cannot be fully understood unless cognitive processes are understood as distributed across artefacts in the environment (Rowlands 2010). There is a debate over whether this distribution is simply an

Kirchhoff (2018) goes on to contrast autopoesis theory with the free-energy principle developed by Friston

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extension of what counts as the mind to non-mind-like entities that still carry out cognitive

functions by the principle of parity. This is Clark and Chalmers’ (1998) Extended Mind Hypothesis. Sterelny’s (2010, 466) alternative view, “niche construction”, argues that a subject constructs tools and artefacts in the environmental niche that scaffold or support cognition.

Depending on one’s commitments to the Clark-Chalmers model or Sterelny’s niche-construction model of extended cognition, one may be swayed to endorse embeddedness, the fourth E. Whereas embodiment is the claim that any agent exists as a body and lives with the constraints of that fact, embeddedness denotes the same idea with regard to the environment. Any agent exists in its environment, and their cognitive activity must function in tandem with it

(Rowlands 2010; Richardson et al. 2008; Warren 2006). If one is a niche-constructionist, then one is likely to understand embeddedness in terms of scaffolding that enables and delineates how an embodied subject exists.

Menary (2010, 462) summarises how putting these features together reconfigures cognitive science: “[t]he once homogenous framework of [traditional] cognitivism is being replaced by a multi-dimensional analysis of cognition as incorporating our brains, bodies and environments”. Despite this rejuvenation, research within 4E Cognition is not necessarily unified. Within one world view different conceptual frameworks permit different research projects, with sometimes incompatible assumptions or methodological principles, let alone different theories to test.

However, they all overlap in a research milieu such that drawing connections between conceptual frameworks can be mutually illuminating. There are two I will focus on here: the Skilled

Intentionality Framework, and the Intercorporeality Framework. I believe there is no problem with combining these approaches, since their points of contention are over research emphasis, not principles. Whereas the Skilled Intentionality Framework begins with a single embodied agent acting in a (social) context, Intercorporeality begins with embodied co-agential interaction. Their underlying principle - embodiment - and their debt to Merleau-Ponty in articulating the scope of investigation in cognition - are the same. Since the underlying principle is embodiment, I will continue to refer to this new research milieu as ‘Embodied Cognition’.

1.3 The Skilled Intentionality Framework

1.3.1 Preliminaries

The Skilled Intentionality Framework is a framework lying within Embodied Cognition (Rietveld 2008a, 2008b, 2012a, 2012b; Rietveld, Denys and van Westen forthcoming; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014). Its intellectual forerunners are threefold: Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) phenomenology, Gibson’s 5

(2015) ecological psychology, and embodied neurodynamics, as inspired by recent conceptions of the “anticipatory brain” (Bickhard 2016, 261).

I do not have space to go into the details of the ecological psychological and neurodynamical facets of the Skilled Intentionality Framework. I will simply indicate that the key notion at the heart of this framework is the notion of an affordance as the currency around which our ecological life and our neurodynamical activity is organised. On the one hand, affordances are embedded in our ecological “niche” (Gibson 2015, 120) (otherwise denoted as our “form of life” [Wittgenstein 1958, §19; cf. Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014, 328] or “patterned practice” [Roepstorff, Niewöhner and Beck 2010, 1051]), through which our everyday life is constructed and regulated. On the other

Its aims are larger, however. It attempts to draw together the different facets of 4E Cognition, as well as

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hand, our brains and bodies form a coupled dynamical system with the environment such that our neurodynamics allow us to respond to relevant affordances, whilst remaining labile enough to switch between affordances in different situations (Bruineberg 2017).

The framework’s debt to Merleau-Ponty is his notion of bodily intentionality, which I have argued is a radical shift away from Cartesianism towards our fundamental embodiment. Rietveld and his colleagues interpret embodiment as having to do with skilfully engaging with affordances.

1.3.2 Phenomenology of Affordances

An affordance is a “possibility for action provided by the environment” (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, 42; cf. Gibson 2015, 119; Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014, 327). They can be subdivided into social and object affordances. Social affordances are “possibilities for social interaction offered by an environment” (Rietveld 2012a, 208). For example, a relative coming to greet me at the front door affords a hug, a friend’s anxious expressions affords consolation, and an extended hand affords a handshake. Object affordances involve things like cups that afford drinking, a chair that affords sitting, or a nail that affords hammering.

Despite the nominal distinction, they are internally related: “[i]n concrete situations object affordances make up an important part of the context of social affordances, and vice

versa” (Rietveld 2012a, 208). For example, as I approach two benches in a park, one empty the other occupied, I am drawn to one or the other depending on whether or not the person on the occupied bench solicits me to approach. Conversely, different social affordances can stand out given a different set of object affordances: on another occasion, the occupied park bench is cleaner than the empty one, and I am drawn towards that bench, which alters the social affordances the occupier solicits, such as a welcoming expression that invites greeting from me.

We can distinguish affordances from “solicitations” (Dreyfus and Kelly 2007, 52), which are affordances that “[stand] out as relevant for a particular [person] in a specific

situation” (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, 42). A cup affords grasping, but the pencil next to it may solicit my using it given my wish to write something down. Affordances lie within a “field of multiple affordances”, which is constituted by the set of affordances that “stand out as relevant for a particular individual in a particular situation; i.e., the multiplicity of affordances that solicit an individual” (42). The phenomenological notion of a field denotes the way all particular phenomena lie within a broader range of experiential possibilities.

Notwithstanding the distinction between object and social affordances, which Rietveld does not believe constitutes a meaningful distinction in practice, all affordances depend on social practices that structure the environment where the field of affordances as a whole sits (Kiverstein 2017). The way a particular environment is structured by social practices informs the “landscape of affordances”, which is the structured set of affordances “available in an ecological niche. In our human form of life, these are related to the whole spectrum of abilities available in our socio-cultural practices” (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014, 42).

We have, then, three levels of description: (1) a single affordance embedded in (2) a field of relevant affordances, and (3) the landscape of affordances of which the field of relevant affordances is a subset along with all non-soliciting affordances. Since social practices inform the landscape of affordances, the relevance of an affordance for us, and our selective responsiveness to an

affordance will depend on social practices. This last point will become crucial when we relate practices to circadian rhythms in 1.5.

Notably, affordances are not causal determiners of action. We act in the midst of affordances that motivate us. If they simply caused our actions, then their affective dimension is lost. As Rietveld notes, “[p]art of the phenomenology of responsiveness to affordances is that affordances

are not mere possibilities for action but are bodily potentiating and/or experienced as having

affective allure” (Rietveld 2012a, 212; cf. Rietveld 2008b, 351). Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014, 342)

describe this affective allure in terms of the “demand character” of an experience by which we are, in Dreyfus and Kelly’s terms, “immediately drawn to act” (2007, 52). Independently of Dreyfus, Kelly (2005, 107) describes this experience as a felt “normative pull”. Following Merleau-Ponty (1973, 19), we could also say that my activity “summons me and grips me”. If affordances were the same as causes, then they would not be experienced as potentiating an active response from us, which is to say they would not solicit from us an intentional stance with respect to them.

Whilst our responsiveness to affordances is affective, this affectivity interlocks with their normative dimension. Rietveld interprets Ponty as coinciding these two aspects. Merleau-Ponty writes of an object affordance:

An oblique position of the object in relation to me is [...] felt as a lack of balance, as an unequal distribution of its influences upon me. [...] There is one culminating point of my perception which simultaneously satisfies [multiple] norms, and towards which the whole perceptual process tends. [... Through the] body I am at grips with the world. (Merleau-Ponty 2002, 352-353)6

The correctness of the angle of the object with respect to me is felt as immanent to the experience; it is a guiding thread for my movements to follow for attaining a better angle. For example, when hammering a nail, my position may be slightly ‘off’, which motivates me to move in order to get into a better position to strike the nail into the wood. And this normative-affective allure is there for social affordances as well. The friend’s hand thrust out to shake mine is perhaps felt as too far away unless I lean forward and take a small step towards my friend in order to shake their hand ‘properly’.

This nexus between normativity and affectivity in our bodily interaction with affordances has, at its heart, a crucial concept: the “tendency towards an optimal grip” (Rietveld 2012a, 217; cf. Bruineberg 2017, 11). Once again, Merleau-Ponty is the progenitor of this concept, although Dreyfus’ interpretation has been extremely influential for the Skilled Intentionality Framework, so I defer to him here. Dreyfus (2002, 378) describes optimal grip in terms of an “optimal body-7

environment relationship”. Furthermore, it is in virtue of being embodied subjects and engaging in skilful, motoric coping that our activity can “take us closer to that optimum and thereby relieve “the ‘tension’ of the deviation” (378). We do not need to have this optimum in mind as a 8

represented goal to be achieved, and normally we cannot express what that optimum would be. Rietveld and his colleagues go slightly further than Dreyfus on this last point to say that this optimum is felt but never reached (Rietveld, Denys and van Westen, forthcoming). The optimum

I have followed Rietveld’s (2012, 217) italicisation for emphasis, and thus referred to French’s translation of

6

the Phenomenology of Perception as Rietveld does. The relevant passage in Landes’ translation is: “The oblique orientation of the object in relation to me is […] experienced as a disequilibrium, as an unequal distribution of its influences upon me. […] There is a point of maturity of my perception that at once satisfies [multiple] norms and toward which the entire perceptual process tends. […] I am, through this body, geared into a world” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 316).

Other authors within the Embodied Cognition milieu, such as Thompson (2007), have also built upon

7

Dreyfus’ interpretation of Merleau-Ponty.

Dreyfus writes in a later paper: “Objects, in other words, draw us to get an optimal grip on them, and we

8

experience a tension whenever the body/world relation fails to achieve that optimum. For Merleau-Ponty, this tension is a fundamental aspect of our involvement” (2007, 63).

calibrates our bodily engagement with the environment precisely because it is never reached; it provides the standard from which a normatively adequate grip on the world can be felt. That said, our embodiment implies that we are always engaged in a tendency towards attaining it. This optimum is felt, never reached, and we are always reaching towards it.

1.4 The Intercorporeality Framework

1.4.1 Preliminaries

The Intercorporeality Framework is another strand of research within Embodied Cognition, which focuses on the inter-active dynamics of embodiment. “Intercorporeality” [intercorporéité] depicts the way our own bodies are intertwined with others’ bodies (Merleau-Ponty 1964, 173). This

entwinement involves reciprocally feeling an other person’s Being-along-with my own, “as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body, or as if my intentions inhabited his” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 191; cf. Fuchs 2017, 9). Current research broadens and deepens this phenomenological notion along a number of disciplines that “transcend the divide between the humanities and social sciences, on one hand, and the life sciences, on the other” (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xxxvi). Despite this, it is not yet a unified or established conceptual framework, although the recent edited collection Intercorporealities: Emerging Interactions in Sociality (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017) has put forward a case that a large body of research is condensing into such a unity.

1.4.2 Intercorporeality, not Intersubjectivity

Two questions relate to the idea that embodied subjects entwine with each other: When does it happen? Why does it happen? They can both be approached by considering whether

intercorporeality is any different to intersubjectivity.

The first question has been approached by many authors from a vast variety of disciplines. Many of them started to conceive of a class of "activities in which the single body’s agency is subsumed by the production of a We, and would be pointless without the simultaneous

participation of an other” (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xvi). Paradigmatic within this class of activities are such things as parent-infant interactions (Sheets-Johnstone 1999), conversations (Loenhoff 2017), hand-to-hand combat sports (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017), and hugging (Goodwin 2017). Each of them is not fully explicable on standard accounts of interaction, which hold that individual intention precedes interaction, even if these standard accounts are

embodiment accounts in the phenomenological sense. In hand-to-hand combat sports, for 9

example, fighters’ action sequences already anticipate the action sequences of the opponent, such that the originary intention of each fighter’s acts - jabbing, feigning, hooking, shifting weight, blocking, etc. - are not simply their own, but constituted in the interaction itself. Each jab is not merely a response to the opponent’s movements, but already anticipates a string of actions the opponent is committed to, and vice versa. Without this interaction, and its reciprocal adjustments, each act would be pointless. In order to properly understand the embodied and enactive qualities of these interactions, intercorporeality researchers argue, research needs to move away from “models in which fundamentally autonomous individuals control their separate bodies and move them in order to achieve coordination, synchrony, understanding” (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xviii).

Cf. 1.2 for three versions of embodiment.

Such a move returns to Merleau-Ponty for inspiration, and his notion of intercorporeality. This is “a radical and coherent conception of the human body as being constituted by its corporeal relations and interactions with other human or animate bodies—a conception, that is, in which the body is never alone in the first place” (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xviii). Constitution is a process of bringing the human body into being. Intercorporeality is a radical conception of this process because it considers the body to be not only something that one is, nor simply something one does, but something ones does with others. It is something enacted by embodied subjects together. This means there is no foundational constitutive level - the individual body - from which shared understandings or shared worlds emerge. Rather, the embodied subject is impossible to live in the absence of other embodied subjects that bring it into being, just as it brings them into being. Constitution is enacted reciprocally. Fuchs (2017, 9) rehearses this point: an intercorporeal action is one in which self and other become interlaced in a “process of mutual affection and perception”. And Loenhoff (2017, 40) argues that intercorporeality “is constituted in a process of reciprocal perception and co-orientation”. Fuchs’ interpretation emphasises the affective character of these interactions, whereas Loenhoff emphasises the mutual orientation towards one another we take in interaction, such that we are better able to perceive the other.

It could be objected that intercorporeality is no different to intersubjectivity - a shared understanding or experience between individually constituted subjects. If so, it would follow that intercorporeality has not moved away from the standard account of interaction at all. The

Husserlian notion of intersubjectivity centres on “the constitution of the other in the consciousness of ego” (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xix; cf. Husserl 1960; Stein 1989). Intersubjectivity assumes a conception of the ego that contains within itself an apperception of the Other as an intentionality that cannot be experienced directly. Nonetheless, we can experience an Other only if we could at least directly experience our inability to experience Other’s intentional life. On this picture, alterity - the Other - is constituted within our own consciousness as something we do not have access to, rather than in the interaction itself.

However, Meyer, Streeck and Jordan follow Merleau-Ponty in arguing that there is a

distinction between intercorporeality and intersubjectivity. They also suggest it was Husserl’s own distinction between Leib and Körper that provided the step towards Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeality and an answer to the second question: why does it happen? That conception hinges around the notion of the body as both Leib and Körper, a fact that opens up the possibility of “double sensations”:

When I touch my right hand with my left hand, the object ‘right hand’ also has this strange property, itself, of sensing. As we have just seen, the two hands are never simultaneously both touched and touching. So when I press my two hands together, it is not a question of two sensations that I could feel together, as when we perceive two objects juxtaposed, but rather of an ambiguous organization where the two hands can alternate between the functions of ‘touching’ and ‘touched’. (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 95; my emphasis)

Merleau-Ponty developed the way this functions in interactive contexts in his later work, where he writes: “[t]he handshake … is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching” (1968, 142). Double sensations express the embodied subject’s fundamental ambiguity. This ambiguity implies multiple bodies can merge, since our constitution of the Other is not a strange kind of intentionality that we can experience as non-experienceable (as Husserl would have it), but of a piece with our first-person experience of ourselves. Merleau-Ponty thus believed

it is through the corporeal experience of the animate, acting other that we acquire our own sense of being a living body (Meyer, Streeck and Jordan 2017, xix). Hence, the ambiguity of the

individuated body in Merleau-Ponty does not undergo a fundamental change in interaction. Meyer, Streeck and Jordan (2017, xx) use this ambiguity to understand how embodied subjects can mutually entwine: “we are able not only to embody the other while the other

embodies us, but also embody ourselves in the same way as we embody the other. Our body can be a subject object for us in the same way the other can be one”. Fuchs (2017, 9) also uses this ambiguous feature of embodiment to make this point about entwinement: “[t]he lived body’s

impression in the one person (A) becomes a living body’s visible expression for the other person (B),

and vice versa: the impression produced in B’s lived body becomes a living body’s expression for A”.

Therefore, it is not the same as intersubjectivity. It occurs in a certain class of activities in which meaning is reciprocally constituted. And it happens because of our ambiguous existence. In a sense, there is nothing special about interaction that is not already implicit in our individual, embodied activity.

1.4.3 Mutual Incorporation

Having sketched the phenomenological basis for thinking about bodies as ambiguous, and opening up the possibility of considering merged embodied subjects (We-subjects), how do Intercorporeality researchers address the specific process of entwinement or “mutual incorporation” (Fuchs 2017, 7; cf. Fuchs and De Jaegher 2009, 466)?

To recall, intercorporeality has an inter-affective dimension, according to Fuchs, and a orientating effect between embodied subjects, according to Loenhoff. Loenhoff argues that co-orientation is constituted in intercorporeal interactions only on condition that bodily movements are mediated by reciprocal expectations. Without these expectations, or anticipations, and their associated affectivity, intercorporeality would never be attained. An example can illustrate this. In a conversation, if the anticipations of what the Other is about to say or do are not felt, or if they are felt but not reciprocally felt, then the conversations stutters. One’s affinity with one’s conversation partner subsides; one feels distanced from them. We can think here of how ‘stuttering’ a

conversation feels, or, in another scenario, how ‘cold’ a person feels when we hug them. Indeed, we can interpret Sartre’s (2003, 78-79) account of “bad faith” in his description of a woman who leaves her hand on a table to be touched but is not present to her hand as a moment of unattained intercorporeality.

However, this stuttering or cold interaction need not persist since our intentionality is always embodied, and therefore continuously engaged in movement. This perpetual motricity falls into definite modes of conduct that imbue our actions with normative-affective content, which we are constantly ‘feeling for’ as we move around and with each other. Quoting Gehlen (1956, 165), Loenhoff argues that modes of conduct involve “optimal accentuations”, which are “experienced by others as a required form [Sollform] and thereby receive the effect of an appeal as well as obligatory content” (2017, 35). This has a number of striking parallels with the discussion of affordances in the Skilled Intentionality Framework. Mutual incorporation - the merging into a We-subject - involves the existence of Sollformen that are normative (they have ‘obligatory content’) and are affective (they have ‘effect of appeal’). In this way, Sollformen are phenomenologically

equivalent to affordances in having these normative-affective characters, and are felt as pulling us towards one another. Furthermore, these Sollformen fall into concise forms of conduct that permit 10

The word ‘Sollform’ has slightly stronger normative connotations than ‘affordance’, however.

‘optimal accentuation’, which I take to be equivalent to our tendency towards obtaining optimal grip in our interactions. This much of Loenhoff’s argument is already implicit in Rietveld’s account of social affordances, but there is a stronger implication: our bodily existences become

incorporated into each other because of these Sollformen and our tendency to obtain an optimal grip on each other.

1.5 Back to Circadian Rhythms

1.5.1 From Seconds to Days: Patterned Practices

The context of the discussion of affordances in the Skilled Intentionality Framework and of mutual incorporation in the Intercorporeality Framework is that of fairly fast time-scale interactions with the environment and each other. With the Skilled Intentionality Framework they include, for example, picking up a cup, hammering a nail or greeting a friend, which take only seconds. What I wish to emphasise is the role of social, patterned practices in grooving into the environment a set of relevant affordances that constitute some optimal body-environment relationship for longer time periods, such as a day, a week, or even longer. I think this generalisation to a slower time-scale makes sense because our fast time-time-scale interactions need to be embedded in a wider context. If they are not, then we face a demarcation problem: at what time-scale does our relationship with the environment or with others cease to be about optimising our grip with it or them? Definite answers to this question seem to push a deeper question away, namely: why is that demarcation valid, but not another? Furthermore, not only would it invite incoherence to not lengthen the time-scale, but interpreting phenomena that last longer than a few seconds in terms of tending towards optimal grip makes plausible sense of the vast number of our activities. It is plausible that patterns in our activities increase our grip on our surroundings rather than diminish it.

For these reasons, the anthropological concept of “patterned practices” can serve as the bridge between fast and slow activity (Roepstorff, Niewöhner and Beck 2010, 1051). This concept proposes that human group life orders itself into specific and semi-stable patterns of interaction. Not only this but these patterns are specific to particular types of situation, defining preferences, predispositions and expectations. Such practices are temporally modulated, which serves to establish regularity in our daily life; they present regularities that arise from everyday life whilst simultaneously shaping it. This reciprocal dynamic assumes that agents within patterned practices are embodied, and that these patterns “get under the skin and the skull […] and [are] remade gradually through collective instances of actualisation” (1052).

Hence, patterns of practice instantiate regularities that lie at the intersection between an organism and its environment, an embodied subject and her form of life. They are inherently temporal because patterns are lived everyday; they do not suddenly stop, but propel us through each day of our lives. Our everyday practices involve when we sleep, eat, go to the toilet, work and relax. That they regularly repeat is inherent to their existence for us. Their regularity also defines the scope of our expectations; we come to expect certain object and social affordances to come into view at different times of day. Not only this, but these affordances come into view as normatively appropriate depending on the patterned practice: sleep is felt as appropriate at certain times, whilst working, eating, and going to the toilet are appropriate at others. When these patterns are disrupted, perhaps when we are ill or late going to bed, we come to notice the underlying shape that patterned practices provide us in optimising our grip with our world.

The role of mutual incorporation in the Intercorporeality Framework builds on this point. It could make stronger conclusions about how patterned practices in our forms of life groove into

our bodies the propensity to act in mutually incorporating ways throughout our daily life. Although to my knowledge intercorporeality researchers have not taken the step to slower time-scale interactions, it is implicit in their account of optimal accentuation of courses of action that broader patterns of practice could function in a similar way. So rather than feeling our way through a conversation to achieve ‘smooth’ communication by incorporating the Other’s

ambiguous embodied existence into our own, one can surmise that we feel our ways through our daily rhythm together by falling into patterned practices. Patterned practices would be felt in our “body schema[s]” (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 101) as motivating appropriate activities at different times of day: it would feel appropriate to sleep, wake up, go to work, eat, relax, and go to bed again at times conducive to the daily life of others around me.

A corollary of this argument is that when we occasionally fail to align our daily rhythm to Others’, we struggle to incorporate each other in our faster time-scale interactions. We might think here of how a bad night’s sleep can sometimes be followed by tense interactions the next morning. We still have a grip on others in these situations, but a sub-optimal grip. This is even truer for people who systematically struggle to live in patterned ways (perhaps those with sleeping disorders or with variable work times due to night-shifts). One of the hallmarks of the

Intercorporeality Framework is its deployment in understanding mental health in terms of mutual incorporation, or the ability to constitute intercorporeal resonance with others (e.g., Fuchs 2013, 2015, 2018). This is an issue I will touch upon in 2.2. For now, it is worth pointing out empirical research that shows people with disrupted patterns of practices, such as night shift workers with disrupted circadian rhythms, are more prone to mental health disorders such as depression or anxiety (Germain and Kupfer 2008). The account of embodiment I have advocated can interpret these empirical results to show that our ability to incorporate others into our daily lives, and our ability to skilfully navigate our social environments, are diminished in these cases.

Conclusion

The lacuna in both empiricist and traditional cognitivist accounts of human life is their account of experience. Following Merleau-Ponty’s (2012, 122) treatment of the empiricists and intellectualists of his own time, we could say there is need for a new type of thought, which takes experience “such as it appears to him who lives it”. Such a non-causal way of thinking is a first-person, phenomenological description that discloses the interlocking, constitutive structures that imbue our daily lives with meaning. In the case of circadian rhythms, that meaning is inextricably linked to how our daily lives have shape and rhythm for us.

Circadian rhythms are quintessentially intercorporeal processes because they revolve around the ambiguity of the subject in her interactions with other ambiguously embodied subjects. If we take phenomenological description seriously, and attempt to marry it to scientific study of our environments and our interactions, then we are led to think about circadian rhythms as operating through our ambiguous bodies and between multiple ambiguous bodies in enacting a tendency towards obtaining an optimal grip on our worlds and each other. Circadian rhythms are

experienced as a patterning of practices that mutually attunes embodied subjects to the same environment in order to optimise our grip on each other. Without circadian rhythms, our grip on each other would subside into individual bodies unable to attune themselves to each other or the world. That this seems the case for people with sleeping disorders, or for those who work night-shifts, opens up the exciting possibility of thinking about ameliorative care with the

The Skilled Intentionality Framework can help us model the landscape of affordances as socially sculpted by patterns of practice. This varies the fields of relevant affordances that become apparent at different times of day, which affect the way our circadian rhythms entrain us to the environment.

Chapter 2: The Tendency Towards

Optimal Grip

Introduction

I will now abstract from circadian rhythms to interrogate embodiment more generally. We have already seen how the tendency towards optimal grip is crucial to affordances in the Skilled Intentionality Framework, and also central to how the Intercorporeality Framework describes the entwinement of embodied subjects. To fully understand this concept, we need to situate it more firmly in its philosophical history. This requires explaining why it arises in phenomenology, which, in turn, requires a brief explanation of phenomenology’s primary tasks. This is the topic of 2.1, which draws heavily on Crowell’s (2012, 2013, 2015) description of phenomenology as a transcendental philosophy.

2.2 focuses on the idea of the tendency towards optimal grip being a seamless attuning tendency with objects and Others. I look at three ways this seamlessness has been problematised: racialised encounters, gendered activity, and depression. Three studies into these phenomena by Bloul (2013), Marion Young (1980), and Fuchs (2013) indicate some interactions vitiate the tendency towards optimal grip.

In 2.3, I will problematise the tendency towards optimal grip from another direction. I propose the phenomenon of alienation can have the form of seamlessly tending towards optimal grip, yet still be meaningless and hollow. I draw on Sutherland’s (2013) description of alienation to provide the phenomenological basis for this critique. I will also argue that the phenomenological features of alienation point towards its complex structure, involving 3 components: (1) one’s lived embodiment is experienced as alien to oneself; (2) to live in the midst of essentially fungible things; (3) to experience one’s own body as on the same level as fungible things. This amounts to saying that alienated activity takes on the form of an exchange relation, which blocks off coming to grips with particular things, whether objects or subjects. Although inspired by Marx’s account of alienation, my account is phenomenological rather than orthodoxly Marxist.

2.1 Transcendental Phenomenology

2.1.1 Meaning Thematised

Phenomenology describes experience from the first-person perspective. Since its inception by Husserl, phenomenology has sought to distance itself from introspective psychology. Whereas introspection treats the first-person character of experience in third-person terms, phenomenology elucidates the first-person character of experience in first-person terms. This method allows phenomenology to describe the essential structures of intentional experiences. Intentionality is consciousness’ directedness towards things. Intentional experiences are “experience[s] of something taken as something” (Crowell 2015, 251; my emphasis).

Husserl’s methodology is the reduction, which has three stages, of which the first is enough to distinguish phenomenology from introspection. This stage is the epoché, or “parenthesizing” stage (Husserl 1960, §8, 1982, §32). The phenomenologist brackets questions about the world’s

existence, nature and whatever other third-person concerns we might have in order to take phenomena at face value. By contrast, the introspective psychologist turns her third-person observational stance within to her ‘stream of consciousness’ to observe how it flows. This is ruled out by the epoché since observations are neutralised of their intentional structure, and hence of their first-person character. What distinguishes phenomenological reflection from introspective

reflection is that consciousness is not thematised as an object among other objects (as in the observation of a stream of consciousness), but described as a mode of being open to the world. To be open to the world is to be a subject whose transcendence with respect to phenomena is inherent in the self-evidence of phenomena for me. It is not the case that phenomena are self-evident for me because there is no reality beyond my consciousness; neither is it the case that I am transcendent with respect to phenomena because my consciousness is removed from things that are said to underly phenomena, which are merely the ideal correlates of real things. Rather, the inexpugnable connection between my transcendence and phenomenal self-evidence consists in my existence as consciousness, which is always consciousness of something. This is not just a two-place predicate, with an object called ‘consciousness’ related to an object called ‘something’. Rather, the nature of the relation is a point of view towards that something. Introspection ignores this directedness or perspectival feature of consciousness

The second and third stages of the phenomenological reduction introduce the fruits of this philosophy. The second step, “eidetic description”, takes phenomena as they appear to

consciousness and runs them through variations that reveal underlying essential structures (Husserl 1960, §34). Husserl calls this “imaginative variation” and, if carried out under conditions of the epoché, it reveals a priori essential structures of consciousness (1970, §9h). The third stage, the transcendental reduction, relates these essential, a priori structures back to the role of subjectivity in constituting experience.

Underlying this methodology is the conviction that intentional experiences are meaningful. The stages of Husserl’s reduction allow us to appreciate that meaningfulness, direct our attention to its essential features, and relate meaningfulness back to subjectivity. Crowell (2013, 114) takes this Husserlian formulation of phenomenology and collates these features into the following point: “[phenomenology’s] fundamental achievement, [is its] recognition that meaning [Sinn] is the proper topic of philosophical inquiry, one that cannot be grasped with traditional categories of mind and world, subject and object”. Similarly, philosophy’s “primary topos” is meaning (Crowell 2015, 245). Phenomenologists after Husserl took up this point, but abandoned Husserl’s reduction.

Notwithstanding their differences, phenomenologists ask of this primary topos: how are meaningful, intentional experiences possible? This is a modalised question appropriate to

transcendentalism as Kant conceived it, but generalised to how experience as such (and not simply the cognitive, axiological and evaluative validity spheres of experience found in Kant’s three critiques) is constituted as valid (Crowell 2015, 245). Hence, it is a transcendental philosophy, and one that must be transcendental if it is to consider this question. What presents itself in intentional experience “is not only there as something but also as ‘truly’ or ‘validly’ existing. Transcendental inquiry is concerned with how such a normative claim – this consciousness of true being – is grounded” (Crowell 2013, 64). Since intentionality is a directedness towards something which takes that something as something, as validly thus and so, transcendental phenomenology asks how this normativity is constituted or “founded” [fundiert] (Husserl 2001, §14 et passim). 11

“Foundation” [Fundierung] is more than merely causal or logical antecedence to a phenomenon,

I use ‘grounded’ and ‘founded’ interchangeably, but see (Nenon 1997).